Mark Jacobs, the former CEO and co-founder of Mythic Entertainment, expects the free-to-play market to decline within a few years.

One of the most prominent and profitable trends to emerge from the videogame world in recent years has been free-to-play. The free-to-play model and the microtransactions that accompany it have pulled many an online game back from the edge of oblivion, and turned more than a few into profitable and thriving properties. In the wake of this success, developers and publishers across the spectrum have been working hard to elbow into the expanding free-to-play market.

According to Mark Jacobs, co-founder and former CEO of Mythic Entertainment, however, companies chasing this current gravy train may, in fact, be sealing their own doom. "Free-to-play is just another model, and just like every other model in the industry, it will hold its special little place for a while but then there will be consequences," said Jacobs, speaking to VG247. "Those consequences in a few years will be a bit of an apocalypse. You're going to see a lot of developers shutting down, and you're going to see a lot of publishers going, 'Oh yeah maybe spending $20 million on a free-to-play game wasn't the best idea ever.' That's part of the reason, but the other reason is equally as important, that if you go free-to-play, you really have to compete with every other free-to-play game out there."

Trying to head off the impending free-to-play armageddon, Jacobs is tailoring his current MMO project toward a different crowd. Camelot Unchained, currently in the process of being Kickstarted, will be aimed at smaller but more dedicated audiences. "Camelot Unchained is going to be a niche subscription game," said Jacobs. "I'll take a smaller subscription base that is dedicated, is energized and is excited to play our game, and to work with our game, than ten times that base where I have to deal with a lot of people who really don't care."

Time will have to tell if Jacobs is right about free-to-play games. Currently, the market is still expanding and while there are free-to-play failures, they don't loom as large as the prominent successes the model has helped to create. That said, it wouldn't be the first time and unforeseen ceiling has emerged to cap a growing trend, and if Jacobs is correct more than a few will be bumping their heads when it appears.

Should click on the source and read the whole thing. What isn't clear in the article is Jacob's basic point is that the already crowded market is going to explode within the time frame he mentioned as devs who are currently working on or will soon start their games bring them to market.There's a pretty long thread about it over on mumorperger .com featuring responses from Jacobs himself and exchanges with trolls who are clearly outmatched but valiantly battle on.I don't disagree with the guy, but I wish I wasn't completely turned off from his project by the volunteer viral marketing army that have been shitting up the internet wherever the most tenuous link between anything and Camelot Unchained can be established.

Not keen on the notion of a Kickstarted MMO, MMO's are expensive to maintain as a rule... unlike a single player game where you make the game and perhaps knock out some patches and DLC , MMO's need to be looked after for a long time.Dare shut the thing down under a year and no one will trust you again.

As for the F2P market...

It depends entirely on what the developer is focusing on (or at least the perception of developer focus) , example Piranha (PGi) who is working on Mechwarrior Online seems to be hyper focused on making items to sell the players, ways to get players to buy more MC all the time... and not really on the game itself which at my last attempt to play was in dire need of fixing.Riot (League of Legends) on the other hand have a very fair system and seem to be adding to the game in ways the none payer can appreciate (graphic updates, reworks, balancing, none pay for features like spectator and hopefully soon to come replays).There is no sense of I NEED to put in money there... I put in money because I want to.

From my perspective I feel it depends entirely on how soon does a F2P game throw up the real cash option into your face, with LoL I didnt feel I ever needed to, I was progressing at a good pace, got all I wanted at a good pace... never felt I hit a wall I had to really work at to break through (or pay up).

MW:O ... hero mechs which are slightly superior to the none real cash variants, consumables with real cash only versions that are superior, slow progress to getting new mechs... and worst of all, a metric tonne of MC only items (cosmetics) in each patch and very little in progress to fixing the game (server side aiming checks + lag, balancing, performance, matchmaking + noobstomping, boating + silly mechanics which work with random dice rolls but not with precision aiming options in a FPS, questionable features (third person view when driving mechs about)).This leads to the perception that the developers are more interested in pulling money out your wallets than your game experience with their title... like how you would feel if say EA launched a very buggy title, and only worked on DLC after... no fixes but lots of DLC.

The F2P market is getting saturated but a lot of the titles are blatant cash grabs which very quickly show the real money wall, so yes lots of titles but only a few real stand outs at the moment.

Actually a smaller niche MMO is possible, it's just that their is the problem of how much server space is needed to make it work at launch. Also, as Dark Souls has kind of proven, sometimes a niche game can become a booming success, which provides the whole problem of expanding the server space to accommodate.

It's kickstarter, though. I say let people experiment with all the crazy ideas they want, since something good is definitely going to come out of it.

One of the reasons DDO is doing so well as F2P is because they actually do the F2P price model rather well. Unlike so many other games. Although DDO has taken a trend for the worse lately with all the astral shards crap.

If Camelot Unchained brings back some of the magic that was Dark Age of Camelot, I'll certainly be on board. DAoC was the only MMO I ever played where I felt the subscription was worth every penny and that the vast majority of the expansions held immense amounts of content. How I long for the days of dropping the mighty hammer of Thor on the heads of a dozen unsuspecting Albs while sieging a keep.

Yeah I agree that the Free to play market will dip and balance out over the next few years after the gold rush period ends. I think the free to play games that handle their micro transactions and game balance fairly well will likely survive any bubble burst mostly but the others we will likely see crash and burn quite badly.

Yep. It's bound to happen, there's space for free-to-play, but it's the nature of things that we'll go too far first. People don't realise that you can't look at Lord of The Rings Online and say they're making millions with free-to-play if we do it then we will too. There's only a limited pool of people and every F2P MMO lowers the potential profits for every other F2P MMO.

And isn't the conversion rate of freeloaders to payers 3%? You can only support so many games off only 3% of the market actually paying for things (unless they're spending 10x what they'd spend on a normal game. Which is unfair for the non-payers to benefit from other people giving so much)

the market is getting over saturated with these games and besides time you dont really lose much when quiting them.(unless you payed for something in game)

friends you can always find on other free to play MMOs and you might even change with all your clan into another game since you dont lose too much (again, besides time and reputation) when changing and everyone can theoretically afford it.

plus people (devs and publishers) are getting really lazy and the games are getting therefore quite repetetive.firefall, for example, is becomming more and more a warcraft clone (still a rumour since a lot of people seem to have been complaining that the combat is too difficult; which dumbstrucks me) and there is nothing that really stands out from other mmos.

plus games seem to get more and more boring the longer you play them (without mods and friends).

DVS BSTrD:Hmmm, wonder if there would be a different option besides subscription and F2P.

free to subscribe.sacrifice your first born or just name it like the product..

BrotherRool:And isn't the conversion rate of freeloaders to payers 3%? You can only support so many games off only 3% of the market actually paying for things (unless they're spending 10x what they'd spend on a normal game. Which is unfair for the non-payers to benefit from other people giving so much)

The majority of players are freeloaders in most other genres as well, except there they are called pirates.

This might also lead to increasing the pool of MMO players. There are whole demographics of PC gamers, who just ignored the MMO market because there was no chance of freeloading at all, but now even they might end up spending a few dollars on the long term.

OT: Of course it will, all bubbles burst eventually.Then its on to the next convention, whatever it may end up being.

Every bubble bursts, but every new business model is a bubble. When TV programs were first invented, they were basically a free-to-watch alternative to cinemas, where the production is effectively funded from all the merch that people are buying thanks to the ads placed beteen the films.

Yet the TV model never bursted.

Just because something is a quickly growing business model, doesn't guarantee that it's growth is fueled by nothing but hot air, maybe there really is a market behind it.

BrotherRool:And isn't the conversion rate of freeloaders to payers 3%? You can only support so many games off only 3% of the market actually paying for things (unless they're spending 10x what they'd spend on a normal game. Which is unfair for the non-payers to benefit from other people giving so much)

This might also lead to increasing the pool of MMO players. There are whole demographics of PC gamers, who just ignored the MMO market because there was no chance of freeloading at all, but now even they might end up spending a few dollars on the long term.

I agree that F2P definitely brings more people into the genre. Way more. That's why it's so successful now. But lets do the maths on it.

You need to bring in 34x more people just to break even on value to the MMO economy. (Which lets recognise for a minute is huge. If there were say 20 million MMO player's before (that's probably a little low. I'm basing it on the idea that WoW had 11 million ish alone) then you need 680 million MMO players before you start even having the same amount of money as you had before. That's 1 person in every 12 alive right now, playing an MMO.

That's not possible. We either need to get the conversion rate a lot higher, or those people paying have to be paying way more than someone did on a monthly subscription. F2P can become profitable for the industry as a whole, but not in it's current form.

(I'm actually a little surprised at just how high that number is. I actually thought it was going to support your side of the argument and I was going to follow it up with how it'd struggle to expand. But the number turned out huge)

There is room in the business for more than one business model. People trying to defend their particular flavor by crapping on others are ham-fistedly trying to market their own idea. Maybe someone should remind them that this is not the 60s, and marketing ethics have advanced a bit since then.

That's not possible. We either need to get the conversion rate a lot higher, or those people paying have to be paying way more than someone did on a monthly subscription.

Or F2P MMOs need to be cheaper to make and sustain than subscription ones.

Read the other half of my previous post, about the TV industry business model. That analogy really works here:If TV wouldn't exist, and I would propose it right now, you could rightfully complain "That doesn't work, only every 100 TV viewers bring in as much profit as a cinema ticket's price, a single movie like The Avengers would need hundreds of millions of viewers, and you still only made one show".

That's why TV doesn't offer cinema production values, that's how a big and stable economy of dozens and hundreds of TV channels and shows can be supported, even though freeloaders fund a fraction of a cinema ticket's price.

Well I'm glad the guy is at least aware of his dedicated cult of followers. He'll get exactly what he is looking for when this game comes out.

Though I have to wonder if he he sees far enough into the future to realize that his little cult of content locusts just might treat this Camelot Unchained as all the other corpses they've left behind since DAoC and Warhammer. What happens if you cater to a niche that you believe is dedicated, only for them to not like the changes you've made? What happens if it isn't "DAoC" enough? What happens if the locusts devour your content then move on and you don't have a FTP model to fall back on?

Its an interesting concept, and it might work. But I have to wonder if this guy really knows his niche players, he might be surprised by how much they have changed.

Well I guess it's a good thing some of the MMOs that took to the F2P/Pay-if-want-to model early have already carved out their own little niches.

Games like Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online are still pretty active and seem to have a pretty decent userbase respectively.

Clive Howlitzer:One of the reasons DDO is doing so well as F2P is because they actually do the F2P price model rather well. Unlike so many other games. Although DDO has taken a trend for the worse lately with all the astral shards crap.

Oh yes Astral Shards are getting a bit annoying. Especially since they changed the way you turn in those collectibles now. I wish they would go back to when you would turn it them in for a random potion or item depending on who you turned it into to. At the very least if you couldn't use it you could sell it for a meager amount of money. Now it's like "Oh no you need about 100 more of those things and maybe about 50 of those other things for this stuff now. Oh but if you bought astral shards you can buy gems from us!"

That's not possible. We either need to get the conversion rate a lot higher, or those people paying have to be paying way more than someone did on a monthly subscription.

Or F2P MMOs need to be cheaper to make and sustain than subscription ones.

Read the other half of my previous post, about the TV industry business model. That analogy really works here:If TV wouldn't exist, and I would propose it right now, you could rightfully complain "That doesn't work, only every 100 TV viewers bring in as much profit as a cinema ticket's price, a single movie like The Avengers would need hundreds of millions of viewers, and you still only made one show".

That's why TV doesn't offer cinema production values, that's how a big and stable economy of dozens and hundreds of TV channels and shows can be supported, even though freeloaders fund a fraction of a cinema ticket's price.

There are technically no freeloaders in the TV business. Also the really do work on the model that you can get pretty much everyone in the world watching TV.

But in principle I agree with you, there is room in the business for a couple of high quality F2P mmos and lots and lots of little ones providing they really are little and can survive on low business numbers.

But that doesn't mean there isn't going to be a F2P apocalypse. There wouldn't be a crash if there's signs that the big executives and CEO's understand that F2P isn't a miracle cure and can only compete in a market carefully limited on budget accepting and sustaining small scale games.

There is 0 sign of that. So there will be a crash. Activision and EA will keep on trying to launch big scale MMOs and doing hash jobs of F2P and it will blow up in their faces and lots of MMOs will shut down and then the MMOs run by smarter people with a clearer understanding of how the model works will survive and we'll reach your safe zone

Yea, people will cotton and and it will become a less desireable alternative. Free 2 play usuall just means pay 2 win. The games may be free to go on, but you're more or less always at a severe disadvantage unless you want to pay a monthly fee for the best weapons etc.

Well, the problem is that the free to play market is simply too greedy and too expensive. The original success of the model was a lot of people who couldn't really afford or justify $15 a month jumping into FTP games to at least play the free content, which was fairly substantial, and then sticking around to spend something, or viewing what they spend as a donation. This was a godsend to games that were making virtually nothing, or losing money.

The problem is that the FTP trend has turned into a "pay to win" or "pay for everything" market that has become focused on inconveinencing players who don't wind up paying constant money, and largely producing more and more paid content. In some cases creating intentionally overpowered content attached to a cash-lottery system which requires players who want to be on top (or remain there) buying keys, chance rolls, or similar things, oftentimes in large quantities.

Some of the better FTP games have been fairly balanced. Star Trek Online, my personal favorite, included a mechanic by which you could slowly obtain any paid content just by playing the game and accumulating and refining dilithium. A trend which also has an equivilent in Champions Online, and the upcoming Neverwinter. Giving Cryptic Money tends to mostly speed the process (greatly) rather than being strictly nessicary, and also their profits have gone into expanding the game outside of just adding more "cash shop" items including a couple of large adventure zones (Nukara, Romulus), new grindcore maps, and of course the upcoming Romulan expansion.

That said, for every STO type game out there, there are tons which exist largely just to hopefully hook people and then hit them with a massive bill to keep playing in a way that is fun. Or games like "DC Universe Online" or "The Old Republic" which are what I like to call "faux free to play games" because for all their pretensions they mostly try and force people into a subscription model anyway (which I actually prefer, but it defeats the purpose). Both of those games feature things like currency caps in order to prevent free to play players from participating in or having much effect on the in-game economy, along with no "ala carte" option to remove that, and other assorted permanant barriers. In short you can pay as much as a lifetime subscription to a subscription based game for those titles and still not get an experience anywhere close to what someone dropping $15 a month gets.

At any rate I expect there to be a collapse in the FTP market simply due to all the greedy idiots jumping on the bandwagon, producing derivitive, but expensive, games which they have no desire to expand other than more paid content. People are catching onto this as time goes on, and I expect a lot of those to collapse. I expect a lot of the more reasonably run games like STO (which still exists to make money, and get you to buy stuff, but isn't as obnoxious about it) to stick around and perhaps more of them, but I expect a lot of those jumping onto the model expecting monster profits and success for little effort to collapse just as those who tried to dial in subscription games did. What's more while they already did their thing, and made a ton of money while lasting a number of years, I expect some games like "Atlantica Online" which got greedier over time to collapse on their own weight right now. With some games you are seeing situations where the survival of the game is literally resting on a relative handfull of fanatics that pay hundreds of dollars each month, while most people pay little or nothing. That's not a state of affairs that cancontinue indefinatly.

As much as I hate to agree with anyone from Mythic, I do kind of agree with him, but for seemingly differant reasons. I'll also say that he has a good attitude about intentionally making a subscription niche game, it's a surprisingly healthy one. More MMOs should have such reasonable attitudes. Of course whether he's being honest about that or not remains to be seen, I saw something similar with "The Secret World" which was being presented as exactly that, yet apparently behind closed doors it was being promoted as this huge, blockbuster, mainstream success that was going to have Funcom rolling in subscription dollars. Anyone could tell you just by looking at the premise that this really wasn't going to happen, though it would collect a solid user base if they maintained it as promised and didn't set expectations too high. This lead to Funcom's stock majorly tanking, and far less tham the promised support for The Secret World where new content has been arriving at a trickle, and it's unknown if we're ever going to see the central plotline continue into Tokyo.

I think that F2P games are having a lot of competition and that will hopefully add standards in game design. I've played several F2P games and find myself switching between them whenever an issue, such as balancing, arises. My one worry is that a lot of crap-ware titles will flood the F2P market (not unlikely by large misguided corporations like EA rather than smaller devs) and people will turn away from them.

I'd like to agree but unfortunately he's got no idea what he's on about.

Free-to-play isn't exactly a "fad", something that just became popular randomly and will fade away over time. It's been a trend in response to the triple-A subscription market. They couldn't compete with the quality of subscription games, so they instead made their games free and offered a micro-transaction system with the hopes of making back their money that way. Thing is, it turned out to be a really, really good way to make money, and as these companies grew, their games got better looking to the point where they no longer looked woefully inadequate next to triple-A games. And over time, they started taking tiny chunks out of the subscription model's profit markets, leading to many of these games switching over to the F2P model to cash in on the trend and regain lost players. Even the world leader in the subscription model, WoW, is now faltering heavily under the increased pressure of so many other valid options available in the F2P market.

Nowadays, F2P doesn't mean "lesser quality" nearly as much any more, so there's no negative stigma. The only thing that will kill the F2P market, at present, are companies like EA screwing it up with poor micro-transaction systems. But even EA can't kill this trend, IMO, it's gotten too big and popular by now.

DVS BSTrD:Hmmm, wonder if there would be a different option besides subscription and F2P.

There already is: Buy-to-play (i.e. the one typically used by non-MMO games).

It's a model that both GW1 and GW2 chose, and it seems to be working pretty well. It's uncertain whether or not it will pik up and become a trend, though.

Oh Wow! Lookie here! It's yet another "Industry Veteran" seeking to predict the next BIG direction in gaming that will dominate all others, while at the same time pimping for a handout because his next doomed project happens to correspond to his highly prescient made up analysis. Wow! Who would have thunk it.

Dear Mr Jacob's. You gave me a great game that I enjoyed. You however also more recently Shit in a box, charged me $59 for it, plus ongoing subscription fees, all while proclaiming it was the next big thing and grabbing money from my pockets like a Dickesonian street urchin. You have no credibility. Please go shut up and sit in the corner alongside such other chatty industry veterans as American McGee until such time as you actually produce another game that I and my fellow gamers might wish to play. We don't currently believe you anymore than venture capitalist investors do. That's why you are begging for money on kickstarter. (And quite frankly the scam of trying to "leverage this new project off of your old succesful game, while not really doing so, but the dweebs will think it is" is kinda offensive.)

You know what the next big trend in gaming and game pricing models is? do you really want to know? It's simple. People will pay appropriately for perceived value. It does not matter if it is subscription, or ftp, or cash shop, or sticking quarters in the machine. Make a good game, and price it in line with what the consumers feel is a good match for the entertainment value it provides. There's a reason why Gabe Newall, Notch, Blizzard and the Angry Bird guys are some of the wealthiest game dev's on the planet these days. Even though they all used wildly differing pricing and payment models for their games. For Fluq's sake stop looking for fads. Stop chasing the next big thing, be it ftp or always online, or motion gaming or whatever. Make a good fluq'ing game. Price it accordingly and give it a low barrier for entry. Then and only then we will talk.

Coming from a guy that did not realise why his first game was successfull and then produced a train wreck of a game with an IP so strong they just needed to translate it to a digital format, all i see here is someone wanting to draw attention to his kickstarter game because no one in the industry would take the risk to give him money.

I think he's probably right. Especially with bigger companies either hoping to hop on the haywagon this late in the game, or to salvage properties that started out subscription-based (*cough* Old Republic *cough*). There's only so much time people have to spend, and they're probably still going to give it to the games that give them the best experiences for their time and money- a factor many eager to go F2P don't seem to fully recognize.

It's really just a matter of the model and the market saturation. Good F2P games work to keep players coming back. When push comes to shove, really good F2P experiences can offer an almost unlimited reason to have people coming back again and again and to keep investing money itno. That means they are a time sink, which means that there is not a place in the market for a million and one F2P games. People who think F2P is permanent are little stupid. But since it's here, there will probably be one good F2P game per genre and that is all the market will allow for. People are going to go where they are already financially and temporally invested, to that which is familiar they have already sunk cost into.

There is no "magic bullet", and I agree that developers and publishers who blindly apply the free-to-play model without understanding when and where it's appropriate, what game designs work best with it, how much to invest in it, and the level of saturation of the market, which can affect the viability of releasing yet another free-to-play game, are more unlikely to do well. The thing is, gamers are willing to pay for games under the traditional models; they simply demand that you are not trying to dick them over in the process. Offer an enjoyable, well-crafted game for not a ridiculous sum of money and gamers will buy it. WoW shows that the subscription model does work; your game simply has to not suck.

Publishers need to also better gauge their sales expectations. There is an audience for just about everything, but one needs to understand how big that audience is and what its buying habits are. You have to understand your ability to compete in a particular market segment/demographic before you ever start trying to invest in the game, so you can better gauge how much to invest and determine what are your chances for success.

In the area of DLC, DLC is not inherently bad. In fact, DLC can a good thing to help the game feel there is more value in the initial investment of the game. The problem has been in the way publishers have gone about releasing DLC. They've been using DLC more as a scam to squeeze more money out of gamers rather than as a value-added and expansion of the initial release.

The existing models work; you just have to understand what conditions allow them to work and what conditions don't. Then you have to ensure that the conditions under which the model works are likely to be existent to improve your game's chance of success. If you just slap stuff together, you're always going to get hit-or-miss results that will likely be more miss than hit. Free-to-play works, but only to a certain degree and only under certain conditions. Of course, nothing is certain, but there are ways of improving the chances for success. Approaching things haphazardly will only give you hit-or-miss type success, usually with more miss than hit. If publishers just jump on the model blindly without thoroughly understanding the caveats associated with it, they'll be more likely to end up failing miserably. The ability of your company to succeed and thrive will be more a matter of blind luck than deliberate, conscious effort.

That's all just my opinion on the matter. I can't claim to be an expert; so, take whatever I say here with some grains of salt.

ADDENDUM: Was just looking at a few of the Free-to-play games on the App Store and reading the comments. I must say, game developers are really working hard to turn the entire game industry into the biggest rip-off in existence. The way some of these Free-to-play games zing you for every little thing is disgusting. What's worse is that many of the people commenting about the games mention that they would be perfectly fine to just pay for the game outright, as long as it's fun and engaging. These tricks and fad cash-grab models game developers and publishers keep using to squeeze money out of gamers is unnecessary and will only result in more gamers simply walking away. Just make a fun, engaging, well-crafted game for a decent price!!! It's not rocket science or hyper-geometrical mathematics. It's very, very dirt simple that even a complete idiot can understand it. All this other bullshit with DRM, DLC, pay-2-win freemium scam, subscriptions, always-online, etc. is nothing but gimmicky wastes of time, energy, effort, and money. Just make a fucking decent game and sell it for a fucking decent price, for fuck's sake.

Notsomuch:It's gonna be kinda sad and Ironic when his game inevitably fails and has to either go free to play or go under completely.

He has explicitly stated that he'd shut the whole thing down before doing that, most recently in the mmorpg.com thread on this topic.

He also says his latest project has nothing to do with DAoC but let's be honest that's what he's trying to recreate success around.

Eh, yeah calling the f2p market shrinking is pretty obvious to most considering the offerings of many of the titles being bland generic rip offs(pretty much anything by Perfect world) or forced f2p to survive and still failing(SWTOR).

Not to say plenty of games don't break that mold. For all the faults of Mechwarrior online at the moment I know it's still got lots of stuff ahead and that it's an honest to goodness mechwarrior game that feels like a proper mech game that I grew up playing.

Notsomuch:It's gonna be kinda sad and Ironic when his game inevitably fails and has to either go free to play or go under completely.

He has explicitly stated that he'd shut the whole thing down before doing that, most recently in the mmorpg.com thread on this topic.

He also says his latest project has nothing to do with DAoC but let's be honest that's what he's trying to recreate success around.

Eh, yeah calling the f2p market shrinking is pretty obvious to most considering the offerings of many of the titles being bland generic rip offs(pretty much anything by Perfect world) or forced f2p to survive and still failing(SWTOR).

Not to say plenty of games don't break that mold. For all the faults of Mechwarrior online at the moment I know it's still got lots of stuff ahead and that it's an honest to goodness mechwarrior game that feels like a proper mech game that I grew up playing.

Not sure how you get nothing to do with DAoC from his statement that this isn't a sequel to it.